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Shortly after the Chicanismo Movimiento crystallized in the 1960s to demand political and national1 autonomy, Chicano-led grassroots organizations began to publish independent newspapers. The decolonial, class-based politics shared in these pamphlets would eventually shape the wave of Mexican-American films produced in the 1980s. While an abundance of scholarship focuses on the activist origins of Chicano cinema, the scale of Marxism's influence on this cinematic movement has often remained in obscurity. This essay seeks to highlight how films such as The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez and The Milagro Beanfield War recast the Chicano community's relation to land access and economic mobility through a class-based, decolonial lens, which was heavily shaped by these communistic elements. Issues addressed in these films were urgent in the increasingly neoliberal climate they were created in, a sociopolitical context which persists into present day, giving these works a political utility for these same communities decades later.
World War II and the Chicano Sense of Identity
This essay will attempt to position the growth of this Marxist influence as a reaction to and result of the living conditions experienced by many Mexicans within US borders; but before this aspect of the 1980s Chicano Cinema Wave can be understood as such, it is necessary to trace the origins of the conditions which the Chicano Movement acted against. Prior to World War II, Mexican communities in Texas were intensely aware of the disenfranchisement they had faced after the Treaty of Guadalupe forced them to cede over 55% of their territory to the US.2 This, along with the destroyed social fabric brought by Spanish colonialism centuries before, not only shaped Mexicans' sense of self, but also their sense of community. Not caring to join the society of their oppressors, many lived in "tight little groups [· · ·]"3 which had minimal outside interference and were largely self-governing.4
But with the outbreak of World War II, as white citizens and US-Mexicans "fought in the same units against a common foe [...] the Border Mexican was surprised to find that the peoples of Europe and the Pacific thought of him as just another American,"5 a perspective which deviated sharply with how many Mexicans perceived themselves at this time. Before WWII, Mexican communities focused not on "being accepted into...